Pre-packaged, generally frozen, sandwich products have become increasingly popular as quick lunch items and even breakfast items which may be ready to eat or which can be defrosted and heated in a microwave quickly and conveniently. The production of such sandwich products has been traditionally a highly labor intensive operation requiring manual assembly of the sandwich components.
Automated apparatus is available and is commonly used in the bakery industry for the production of various layered baked goods, such as for example cookies which have upper and lower sections and a filling in between. Normally the outer surface of the cookie sections is provided with a design which must be maintained on the outer surfaces of the finished product. Accordingly, such machines require the use of pick up wheels or the like which are primarily concerned with the taking of already separated cookie sections and inverting one section with respect to the other so as to be properly positioned for assembly over the filler material which is then deposited on the bottom cookie. Other types of machines for the automated production of pizza and similar products are not suited for sandwich making since they are not concerned with slicing and separating the sandwich materials and reassembling the materials into a sandwich.
Accordingly, it is highly desirable to provide an automated sandwich assembly mechanism which is reliable and which can produce sandwiches at a relatively high production rate.